that he should on Friday request that MPs vote for a Bill which his Attorney-General had strongly denounced on Wednesday. Asquith and the rest of the Government opposition to the trade unionists' Bill argued against it inside the Cabinet but the outcome of the Committee dealing with the Bill in August was to favour the trade unions' alternative. During the Second Reading of the Trade Disputes Bill, Sir William Robson noted that the Bill was intended to prevent "industrial conflict being the subject of litigation". Assessments George Dangerfield wrote in his The Strange Death of Liberal England: It gave the Unions an astounding, indeed an unlimited immunity. Labour was jubilant. The most powerful Government in history had been compelled, by scarcely more than a single show of power, to yield to the just demands of organized workers. The English constitutional theorist A. V. Dicey argued that the Act conferred upon a trade union a freedom from civil liability for the commission of even the most heinous wrong by the union or its servant, and in short confer[red] upon every trade union a privilege and protection not possessed by any other person or body of persons, whether corporate or incorporate... [this Act] makes a trade union a privileged body exempted from the ordinary law of the land. No such privileged body has ever before been deliberately created by an English Parliament. The economist Joseph Schumpeter in his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy said of the Act: It is difficult, at the present time, to realize how this measure must have struck people who still believed in a state and in a legal system that centered in the institution of private property. For in relaxing the law of conspiracy in respect to peaceful picketing—which practically amounted to legalization of trade-union action implying the threat of force—and in exempting trade-union funds from liability in action for damages for torts—which practically amounted to enacting that trade unions could do no wrong—this measure in fact resigned to the trade unions part of the authority of the state and granted to them a position of privilege which the formal extension of the exemption to employers' unions was powerless to affect. It remained in force until 1971. For the centenary of the Act, the Trades Union Congress campaigned for a Trade Union Freedom Bill. Right to strike The Act was one of the most significant pieces of